USING CROWD-FUNDING AS A MOTIVATIONAL DEVICE FOR CROWD-SOURCING ASSESSMENTS FROM TEACHERS

One of the key problems especially in developing countries is the unavailability of quality assessments or question banks that are tied to the curriculum. Assessments play a key role in the education processes and can take many forms including diagnostic, formative or summative; assessments can either be criteria or norm-referenced. The wide-spread availability of mobile devices and tablets has created the potential of deeply integrating various types of digital assessments within the educational processes. However, one key challenge is the unavailability of quality assessments. Teachers and textbook authors in many countries are typically not well-trained in writing good assessments, and hence the unavailability of readily available quality assessments is a key problem to be solved before mobile phones and tablets can be used as distribution mechanisms for these digital assessments. Since crowd-sourcing platforms like Wikipedia have shown that it is possible to crowd-source quality content using structured editorial processes, one approach to gather assessments is via crowd-sourcing. This is a sustainable approach to creating assessments because each country typically has a large population of teachers that provides a large enough pool of teachers for contributing assessments. Assessment Wiki is an extension of Media Wiki platform to support curriculum-based crowd-sourcing of assessments from teachers. Experiments with teachers have shown that it is possible to crowd-source quality assessments using this platform. However, like Wikipedia and several other crowd-sourcing platforms, the ‘long tail’ phenomenon has also been observed; most crowd-sourced content typically has a skewed coverage of topics both in terms of quantity and quality. Since these platforms depend on volunteers, the topics covered well are those which are also of interest to the contributors. However, since the crowd-sourced assessment bank is required to conduct a variety of assessments, it is important the assessment coverage is as specified in the curriculum, and not based on the interests of the contributors entirely. For example, if a particular topic in the curriculum is specified to have a weight of 10%, then approximately 10% of the assessments in the assessment bank should be on this particular topic. However, it is very possible that there may not be any voluntary contributors for this topic. Voluntary teacher contributors for Assessment Wiki were found to be internally motivated. However, there are crowd-sourcing platforms that rely on monetary or external awards. This paper explores that use of crowd-funding to reward teachers for contributing to topics that have skewed coverage in the Assessment Wiki. The system uses services from the WePay crowd-funding platform to add crowd-funding capabilities to Assessment Wiki where campaigns for crowd-funding for curricular topics not in the Wiki can be launched and managed. The system considers two types of reward mechanisms; monetary transfer to the contributor’s bank account directly and mobile phone credit transfer to teachers’ mobile phones. Since mobile phones are pervasive, in addition to using SMS for crowd-funding campaigns, the system uses SMS messages to invite teachers to contribute to a specific topic on the Assessment Wiki.